Brookings Mountain West In the News

Nevada’s higher education system suffers from a bloated administration, inequitable funding that favors UNR at the expense of other schools, mismanagement that has destroyed trust among donors, and a dismal graduation rate despite strong per-student funding from the state.

Daniel Waqar’s U.S. government class at Advanced Technologies Academy planned to send eight students to the Sun Youth Forum.

The high school students would compose an essay, which would be used by their teacher in determining who would attend the annual event, designed for young people to express their opinions on topics such as school violence and foreign policy. Many in Waqar’s class wanted to be included.

The 2018 midterm elections brought about considerable political change in our state. We discuss these changes with an expert panel of election analysts – the reasons for our state’s shift to blue in our key state and federal seats, shifting voting patterns, the ushering in a new era of women leadership, and what or how may prompt a shifting tide again in the coming 2020 election.

After watching Mitt Romney and several other Republican candidates lose in the 2012 election, the Nevada GOP went to the drawing board to figure out how to come back stronger in 2014.

As described by UNLV political science professor David Damore during a panel discussion last Wednesday, the approach they came up with relied heavily on reaching out to black and Latino voters and inviting them into their party.

There’s one thing that rich and poor have in common in the U.S. — they both tend to describe themselves as “middle class.”

That might reflect the nation’s historical egalitarian ethos – “all men are created equal,” the 19th century rise of democracy, the faith, however misplaced and vexed, that in the U.S., while everyone is not born filthy rich, everyone has the opportunity to become so.

Nevada academics wasted no time jumping into an election post mortem. The Brookings Institute held a post-election panel discussion Wednesday where they analyzed the previous night’s “blue wave,” in which Democrats claimed victory in almost all statewide races. Panelists included Brookings Mountain West Executive Director Robert Lang, UNLV political science professor David Damore, Brookings fellow John Hudak and Women’s Research Institute of Nevada Director Rebecca Gill.

Incumbent Dean Heller issued a challenge to state Republicans during his concession speech to Jacky Rosen, who defeated him Tuesday in their race for U.S. Senate. “As a party,” he said, “we’re going to have to come together and decide how we’re going to go forward in the future.”

Nevada academics wasted no time jumping into an election post mortem. The Brookings Institute held a post-election panel discussion Wednesday where they analyzed the previous night’s “blue wave,” in which Democrats claimed victory in almost all statewide races. Panelists included Brookings Mountain West Executive Director Robert Lang, UNLV political science professor David Damore, Brookings fellow John Hudak and Women’s Research Institute of Nevada Director Rebecca Gill.

Marlina Delgado had never voted in a midterm election until Tuesday, nor had she been a party-line voter in presidential elections. In 2016, for instance, she was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio until Donald Trump won the nomination. But this year was different.

A country’s leader must provide security by economic and representational means to all its people, so that the insecurities of a faction do not manifest into acts of hate, violence and oppression against others.

Behind the daily headlines of our turbulent political climate is a stark, hard fact: the American middle class is hurting. Household incomes for the middle 60 percent of the distribution are rising, but painfully slowly, and primarily due to more work (including longer hours) rather than better wages.

The UNLV School of Medicine is preparing to take the next critical step toward full accreditation and ultimately to expand its current class of 60 students per year to 120, then 180. This is in direct response to the needs of Southern Nevada.

When we are getting the job done, our political differences don’t matter

As a one-time executive for Habitat for Humanity, Anthony Pipa saw how the organization’s homebuilding projects for struggling families brought together Americans from across the political spectrum in support of a worthwhile cause.

A 2020 U.S. Census undercount could have potentially large ripple effects for everything the census determines — from how congressional seats are distributed around the country to where hundreds of billions of federal dollars are spent.

Opponents of public schools like to dissect teacher salaries in all sorts of ways to suggest that K-12 educators are not underpaid and in fact are lavishly rewarded for their work. But don’t let those numbers fool you.

When Samantha Gross visited UNLV in 2017, President Donald Trump had just announced that he planned to rescind the Clean Power Plan.

Fast-forward a year, and Gross was back in Las Vegas on the day when António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, told global leaders that the world had less than two years to avoid “runaway climate change.”

Sept. 18 turned out to be an opportune day to speak with Geoffrey Gertz.

Gertz, who studies the global economy and development at the Brookings Institution, was visiting UNLV that day and was watching as President Donald Trump announced $200 million in new tariffs on Chinese imports and China retaliated with $60 million in new tariffs on U.S. goods.

Ten years ago this week, the spectacular death of Lehman Brothers began the financial chaos that preceded the Great Recession.

Lehman — and much of the investment community — was highly leveraged and overexposed to a sagging real estate market. That led to a financial crisis, a bailout of Wall Street, and the worst economic downturn since the Depression.